Car-Free Moving Day

A friend of mine recently reminded me of the bicycle based move I did in San Francisco in 2002. If you’ve never done a car-free move, I highly recommend it. Invite all your friends, their bikes, and their trailers, and as many bungee cords as they can scrounge up. Then buy them all pizza and beer (alcoholic beverages recommended only after the move for obvious reasons) and then have at it! Here I am hauling my king size mattress and box spring down Haight St. as the tourists and hippies stared at us.  You can see one of the benefits of moving mattresses by bike is that it’s a whole lot easier to take the lane!  We were joined by several kids on bikes, who kept wanting rids on the mattress.  I think we took the concept of traffic calming to a whole new level that day….

Here we are tying down the mattress to the large industrial strength bicycle trailer that we borrowed from the SF Bicycle Coalition. Luckily we only had to move a few blocks, and it was downhill.

Moving by bike is a form of direct action. It says to the world, “look what can be done without cars- moving house is one of the times when you think a car would be really necessary. But if it’s possible to move your stuff by bike, imagine what’s possible on a daily basis.” It is truly amazing what you can carry on a bicycle. I think we were inspired by the guy below.